Cynthia Ozick Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

What we remember from childhood we remember forever — permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

Cynthia Ozick
Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Cynthia Ozick
Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.

Cynthia Ozick
If we had to say what writing is, we would define it essentially as an act of courage.

Cynthia Ozick
I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be—not to have a "career," but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

Cynthia Ozick
If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain.

Cynthia Ozick
Metaphor relies on what has been experienced before; it transforms the strange into the familiar.

Cynthia Ozick
To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.

Cynthia Ozick
Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.

Cynthia Ozick
The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.

Cynthia Ozick
Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.

Cynthia Ozick
Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.

Cynthia Ozick
I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.

Cynthia Ozick
It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life.

Cynthia Ozick
An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

Cynthia Ozick
Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it — so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

Cynthia Ozick
He started on the first page and finished on the last. He was not a skimmer or a sniffer; he read meticulously, as if, swimming, he were being filmed in slow motion.

Cynthia Ozick
The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

Cynthia Ozick
Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.

Cynthia Ozick
After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies. We get to be responsible for our faces.

Cynthia Ozick
Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

Cynthia Ozick
Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.

Cynthia Ozick
We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake — especially an obvious idea — has no respectability.

Cynthia Ozick
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.

Cynthia Ozick
When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

Cynthia Ozick
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

Cynthia Ozick
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

Cynthia Ozick
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

Cynthia Ozick
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.

Cynthia Ozick
Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.

Cynthia Ozick